Grass Roots

Unconference: “Re-Rooting Digital Culture”

This post comes to you from Cultura21

13th of May at the University of Westminster

Over the last decade the awareness of anthropogenic climate change has emerged in parallel with global digital communication networks. By their very nature, the new tools, networks and behaviours of productivity, exchange and cooperation between humans and machines grow and develop at an accelerated rate.

The transdisciplinary panel will explore the impact of digital culture on climate change, developing themes adopted in grass-roots, emerging and established practices in art, design and science.

The ideas for the unconference have grown out of Furtherfield’s Media Art Ecologies programme. ”Unconference” thereby stands for a participant-driven meeting, which tries to avoid some of the aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees, sponsored presentations, and top-down organization.

Furtherfield was founded in 1997 as the Internet took shape as a new public space for internationally connected cultural production and is now a centre where upwards of 26,000 contributors worldwide have built a culture around co-creation – swapping and sharing code, music, images, video and ideas.

For more information visit: www.furtherfield.org.

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

– Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)

– Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)

– Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)

– Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

Age of Stupid as a model for climate activism

Armstrong filming in New Orleans, 2006Armstrong filming in New Orleans, 2006

On the eve of the premiere of Age of Stupid, an email from director Franny Armstrong:

Tabloid Revolution: Three million people will have choked on their cornflakes this morning when they read Pete’s column in the Sun. See attached. “We – that is humanity – have only a couple of years left to act if we are to stop catastrophic climate change causing the deaths of hundreds of millions of people.” In The Sun.

Pete being Pete Postlethwaite. The column is an achievement in itself in a paper that last year published a column by Kelvin MacKenzie  headlined Global Warming Doesn’t Exist.

The Age of Stupid has been an exemplary campaign, from the crowd-funding strategy that raised £450,000 to meet production cost, £130,000 to meet distribution and publicity costs and a further £164,000 for political campaigns running alongside the movie, to an incredibly efficiently run grass-roots internet strategy to get the words out.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology